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i was tagged by the goddess Isis for this meme thing:
Post your best/worst covers and tag some more muppethuggers. Oh and do a linkback to whomever tagged you if it wasn’t me.
okay. i’m a fan of a slightly different genre than you hear over at Isis’ place. but here ya go.
best cover:
Jimi Hendrix covers All Along the Watchtower, originally done by Dylan.
this is a total, dominating win.
worst cover:
Seether covers Careless Whisper, originally by Wham!
and this shit is ALL OVER the radio right now. gross. they should be ashamed of themselves for this pathetic showing.
i’m tagging my fellow student types: AA, JLK, Juniper, and Sci. 
so i was approached today by some dude. he says to me, “you’re mixed, right?”
i kinda stare in disbelief, not saying anything. when the hell did this become a way to introduce yourself?
“you’re mixed race, right?”
uhhh. does it matter? and why the hell would i want to talk to a stranger about that? how would he feel if i approached him, saying, “hey, you’re black, aren’t you?” that’s a little uncomfortable.
part of me thinks he and his female companion were just looking for a connection in this place, where they were probably 2 out of 150 people in the general vicinity who didn’t look white… AND the only mixed couple to top it off. part of me was kinda annoyed.
they were really nice folks when we got to talking, so i gave them the benefit of the doubt. but rly wtf?
i don’t care what people do or don’t assume about me, but i’ve never been approached like that before.
i am making a desperately needed escape from my end-of-grad-school crunch. this stuff was taking over my life, and i was neglecting myself and some other important people. simply, my personal life needs to have some time to… exist. that’s what i’m doing.
i see that my fairly rare expertise in my field is needed for some science issues rattling around the blogosphere. however, i can’t really blog about it presently. it will have to wait until after i finish writing a bunch of other stuff and get that pesky defense out of the way.
soon i will be back to my semi-regular blogging schedule, and i will tell you about some of the informal mentoring and role-modeling for younger women and even a science-inclined elementary school-aged girl that i’m doing here at home.
in the meantime, a couple of notes:
1. to the person who found my blog searching for “dissertation supervisors from hell” – please don’t stand up for that shit for too long. i did, and it was some bad news. my second mentor totally rocks, and the major upheaval was worth it in the end.
2. to the home state trooper who pulled me over 40 miles from the end of my 1200 mile road trip- thanks for not noticing the several other illegal modifications to my vehicle. i mean, aside from the ones you nailed me for. and yeah, i’ll get around to fixing that. eventually.
3. to my readers- thanks for keeping things from getting too out of hand around here since i’ve left. see you soon.
the past two days have shown me just how far the right connections can take you. fortunately for me, my academic field is a very small world, so everyone ends up somehow knowing everyone else. this is kinda cool, especially since practically everyone i meet knows and respects my boss.
also, i have one critical contact outside of academia who just hooked me up with someone very cool in a good place, who gave me some solid, career relevant advice and is willing to do a huge (from my perspective) favor for me.
srsly, networking is a total win. now let’s see if it pans out to anything…
in other news, as of today, the thesis draft is out of my hands. yesss!
and, my touchpad is messed up. boooo. i didn’t expect to have to fix something within 3 months, but the thesis writing was pretty rough on the poor computer. i will cut it some slack.
i am frustrated.
100% = total monthly stipend
15% = tax (accounting for massive education credits, or it would be worse)
33.3% = payroll deduction- tuition and fees
22% = health insurance
29.7% = leigh’s cut, which, thanks to fees hikes, just dropped by about $150/month. this is a very large chunk of money for a graduate student. (nevermind that an error last year left her with 11 months of pay in 12 months this year.)
fuck… i need to get out of here. each semester they turn the screws harder.
leigh has gotten two awesome leads today on the fierce job hunt during the economic situation from hell.
every time something good happens to me, i tend to undermine myself. so i am going to take a few deep breaths and calm down. i am going to compose good replies and i am going to write a list of good questions for the contact who has invited me to call for a conversation.
i need to prepare. and i should probably arrange for a quiet environment when i am ready to make this phone call. wish me luck on this stuff!!
folks, it’s been a very crazy week over here. not only did i finish writing my dissertation and handle some bullshit from an equipment manufacturer, but i launched a full-scale attack on the job market. i’m hitting both academic and industrial listings, and have even made the decision to apply for a rare good opportunity in a place i never EVER thought i would live. i emailed people i knew who might know of positions that were unadvertised, and i got back in touch with the outside mentor who saved me from walking with a master’s degree 3 years ago, who also happens to be an influential person in his field and has offered to provide me with a good reference that (maybe, just maybe) might help me get the abovementioned good opportunity far, far away.
yesterday i applied to any and all relevant and interesting industry jobs- limited to places where my spouse could also get work. sad to say, the economy has not made it easy to do this. many require previous industry experience. while i have seen Dave Jensen of Science Careers fame give an amazing talk on the job search, his advice of finding the name of the hiring manager and addressing your applications directly to them can be considerably difficult when you’re dealing with a private company. i tried, Dave, i tried. i did, however, tailor my resume to describe myself as a match what each company was asking for in the job ad. this has resulted in many versions of it, but i hope that helps to make me stand out as a candidate who is not just blindly applying for anything out there.
i also wrote letters to several academic faculty of interest, but they currently stand as word documents. i will read them one more time and send them on monday, because i am completely exhausted.
i titled this “the small accomplishments” but i should quit marginalizing them. they’re big accomplishments… so long as they lead to something better in the future…
dear boss,
you are teh awesome. srsly. thank you. i totally adore you.
dear bigcompanyperson,
it’s been how long now and i still haven’t heard from you. ok, so you didn’t see how great i am. your loss.
dear economy,
suck it.
dear science,
i love-hate you right now.
dear people at prospective workplaces,
keep an eye on your email. awesome prospective postdoc/employee will be contacting you soon.
dear science-family,
i am so glad that you are so large and include such big-name field people. this is going to be a huge help to me. promise i’ll use it only for good, not for evil.
dear Biotech Company Who Shall Not Be Named,
what i said to the economy.
dear readers,
start spending a significant amount of time looking for a postdoc more than 2 months before you defend. that’s several of you out there. go now, start reading about what other people are doing and contact them. i do not recommend being 2 months out from losing health insurance and income, and not having something- ANYTHING- lined up. learn from my stressing out.
love,
leigh
we have a huge dilemma here in our little apartment…
see, i was supposed to be done with my experiments months ago (see: open letter to Biotech Company Who Shall Not Be Named) and yet i keep dealing with consumable equipment failure. the last experiment is 75% done and we’re talking about 2 weeks of real work remaining here, once the timing has played out and once i am confident in the replacement equipment.
so we were supposed to be able to up and move to a city where husband could get jobs and work, while i finished non-experimental loose ends for the phd.
except that we can’t move, because i still need to be here. and there are no fucking NewCareer jobs in the entirety of this state (as we were warned in the past, but at the time figured we would be ready to leave by now). they are fairly good in HomeState and several other locations we are considering.
while the job prospects are good for him in HomeState, the one company i could be working for doing EXACTLY what i love won’t be hiring again until spring. the other company i could be working for isn’t hiring, period. and HomeState U just doesn’t have much strength in literally any of my fields of interest. so we can’t just move to HomeState, either. this economy just blows.
i guess i need to get my ass moving on lining up a postdoc. since the dissertation is finished and my final experiment is once again trashed, i have shifted all efforts to this end. but this would be far easier if there were only one career to consider.
this was supposed to be an exciting time, instead we’re both just stressed the fuck out.
i am SUPER RELIEVED to have heard from my industry contact for the first time in quite some time. i had assumed he was no longer interested in helping me, but i got a very nice reply to my email. he is a good connection to have, as is my connection in HomeState.
if only the economy wasn’t trashed, i would probably be far more hopeful right now.
the psychoactive drug that most people are familiar with is alcohol (aka ethyl alcohol, or ethanol). i am going to assume that many of my readers have experienced what it’s like to drink, probably to have too much, and the uncool experience to be had the next day. let’s talk about why this happens.
blood alcohol and psychoactive effects
like with all drugs, the effects of ethanol are dose-dependent. it doesn’t matter what the vehicle for your ethanol is (whiskey, tequila, vodka, etc- pick your favorite), the effects are due to the ethanol you’re ingesting. generally, ethanol can be categorized as a sedative: it dose-dependently decreases consciousness.
low dose ethanol is disinhibiting. while we don’t know the exact neuroanatomy of how this works, low dose alcohol lets you think that you are an amazing dancer, really funny, and you could totally win in a fight with that big scary person over there when you would ordinarily use better judgment.
a little higher dose starts to induce more notable CNS depression, affecting your coordination, sensory input, and cognitive ability. walking, talking, and especially doing both at the same time become strangely difficult. but despite the challenge, you’re still probably trying to announce to the universe things that you normally would keep to yourself. also, the gross central perception and reaction deficits are what make it very unsafe to operate machinery (say, your car) after drinking.
as you increase the dose further, you drop even further down the consciousness scale: sleep, then coma, then death. sleep is one thing, but coma and death are the ultimate price to pay.
so how does it do this stuff?
ethanol acts at several membrane-bound proteins in the brain. it is an agonist at GABA-A receptors and an antagonist at NMDA glutamate receptors. so not only are we increasing inhibitory signaling, but we’re simultaneously decreasing excitatory signaling. it also blocks voltage-gated calcium channels- recall that calcium influx is required for quite a few important things, like vesicular neurotransmitter release. with these properties laid out in front of you, it is pretty easy to see how ethanol is a CNS depressant.
for those of you familiar with sedatives, the mention of GABA-A receptors should sound familiar as well. the sedative-hypnotic drugs such as barbiturates (phenobarbital, pentobarbital) and benzodiazepines (diazepam, triazolam) are also agonists at the GABA-A receptor. while barbiturates can open the GABA-A channel on their own, benzodiazepines can only potentiate the opening of the channel in the presence of GABA- they have no effect without GABA. like barbiturates, alcohol is capable of opening the channel on its own. the barbiturates fell out of favor when the benzos came around due to the huge increase in drug safety offered by the benzos.
ethanol can also be reinforcing via indirect effects upon dopamine release, leading to addiction. we know that addiction leads to some major deleterious long-term changes in the brain, and some devastating effects upon lives. (not just the lives of the alcoholics, either.) that’s as far as i am going to venture into ethanol addiction for this post.
but it has to get to your brain somehow…
time for a little pharmacokinetics action. leigh is not necessarily an avid pk lover, but she’ll engage it as needed. after all, it’s an important part of pharmacology. and practical knowledge to have.
since you ingest ethanol orally, it has to be absorbed into your bloodstream through your GI tract. normally, about 20% is absorbed through your stomach, with the rest getting absorbed further down the way in the small intestine. if you have food in your stomach, you slow your absorption by quite a bit. remember, intoxication is correlated to how much ethanol is available in your bloodstream. slowing your absorption gives you more time in the low blood ethanol concentration range early on. this is pretty good for keeping from getting very drunk immediately and bypassing the low-dose inhibition phase for the staggering, confused stage or worse. this is why you are advised to eat before drinking, and why it’s a good idea.
however, i have no explanation why certain foods are especially appealing when you are drunk. (i have some very favorite hometown foods that i just crave when i drink… this is what i get for growing up in my home state!)
of course, once the ethanol is in your blood, it’s going to tour through your body until it’s broken down. but before it gets to distribute to the various tissues of your body, it passes through your liver for a little first-pass metabolism action first. (remember this happens when you take a drug orally.) ethanol is broken down by alcohol dehydrogenase (ALDH) in your liver. unlike most other drug-metabolizing enzymes, ALDH has zero-order rate kinetics. in straight-up terms, this means you can metabolize roughly one drink per hour, regardless of how much you’ve consumed. once it’s in your bloodstream, the only significant way to get rid of it is by metabolizing it. (well, there is always vomiting for the stuff that’s still in your stomach. but that’s a flagrant sign that you should have stopped sooner.)
so you can control how quickly and how much ethanol goes into your system, but it’s a pure waiting game on getting rid of it. so knowing this, you can consider how much you’ve had to drink already, how quickly you’re getting rid of it, and use that information to maintain a desired level of ethanol intoxication. adding in more ethanol than you get rid of in one hour will increase your blood ethanol and lead to greater intoxication. on the flip side, adding in less ethanol than you get rid of in one hour will lead to a reduction in blood ethanol and start recovery from intoxication.
as a nice little water-soluble and lipid-soluble molecule, ethanol makes its way through the blood-brain barrier no problem. (as you might guess, it also crosses the placental barrier no problem… this is something that is strongly advised against, because ethanol impairs fetal development.) once it makes it to the brain and binds to the proteins we discussed above, that’s when the psychoactive effects happen.
alright, so i had a blast last night, but my head is killing my and my mouth is damn dry!
hangovers are not fun. there are several things that could be causing you that pain, but nobody has 100% certain data about the exact causes. this is what we generally thing is going on. first, alcohol dehydrates you. yes, in consuming it you also ingested a lot of water, but ethanol is a diuretic and makes your body get rid of water. being dehydrated feels pretty nasty. your stomach lining is probably irritated, too. (and probably your upper GI tract too, if you spent some time vomiting at the end of the night.) that will make it fun to try to drink some water to try to relieve the dehydration.
that headache could be caused by vasodilation, which is associated with ethanol use. (though in glancing through the literature, it seems that higher doses can cause vasoconstriction. so i’m not entirely sure what to make of this.)
you probably have some unpleasant metabolites hanging around in your bloodstream causing you some pain, too. acetaldehyde is the product of ethanol’s metabolism by ALDH. this causes nausea, vomiting, flushing. (mutations in aldehyde dehydrogenase, the metabolic enzyme of acetaldehyde, are the cause of “asian glow”.) the production of these metabolites also uses enzyme cofactors your body could be using for other things.
and finally, there is potential for acute ethanol withdrawal. after a night of dumping ethanol into your body, you might have developed a little bit of acute tolerance to the stuff. when your body metabolizes it and removes it from the system, it is going to need to adapt to the changes in physiologic conditions. hence, acute withdrawal. and how do you help counter withdrawal? put just a little bit of the drug back into the system. this is partially where the “hair of the dog” philosophy comes from. (the other reason “hair of the dog” might work is the effects of a low dose of ethanol might just help you cope with the unpleasantries of the hangover.)
as far as remedies… so far there is no proven remedy except time.
the requisite common-sense precautions
since i never know who’s reading, and i get a lot of search hits on my how-drugs-work type posts, i’m going to include some common sense things here. they are not intended to scare, they are intended to inform. information is the best armor against harm.
1. excessive ethanol can kill you. don’t be macho. if you don’t know what you’re doing, be very careful. eat before you go drinking, and drink a soft drink between hard drinks. nobody has to know it’s a soft drink! and keep an eye out for your friends at all times too. nasty things have been slipped into many a drink. watch the bartender make or open your drink, and don’t accept something that’s been passed around or brought to you.
2. one way people die from alcohol consumption is from aspirating vomit. this is where the glottis, the flap that separates your esophagus from your windpipe, is paralyzed by the alcohol and you vomit into your lungs. this is a very dire emergency.
3. seriously, if you’re vomiting, that means you have had too much and you should not attempt to continue drinking. just in case that dumb idea ever occurs to you.
4. the behavioral effects peak before your blood ethanol concentration peaks. they also fall more quickly than your blood ethanol levels. this means you feel less impaired as you recover from intoxication, but you are probably more impaired than you think you are. keep this in mind.
5. remember you can metabolize roughly one drink (1 shot, 1 beer, etc) per hour. use this information to decide how much to drink and how quickly to drink it. you are always safer overestimating how much alcohol you think you have on board than underestimating.
you probably won’t get much more enjoyment out of ethanol, knowing more about how it works. but it might explain some things you hadn’t thought of before. so go forth and enjoy your favorite drink responsibly.
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